1 missed call
by Tezpin
Summary: She just wants him to call. Rose revisits Salt Lake City in the year 2012. Rated T just to be safe, but really nothing here but angst and a small hint of NineRose. PLEASE REVIEW!


**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Doctor Who or any of the characters, but I would be very happy if someone gave them to me for my birthday!**

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She could tell it was starting by the discontented murmurs she could hear coming from the internet cafe. Seconds later the lights went out. The time lapse would have been too small to notice if she hadn't been expecting it, waiting for it.

She stood in the centre of the crowded mall, surrounded by shoppers muttering and making sounds of surprise as the power flickered and died. The terrorist attacks of previous years had left a legacy of fear in most people, and any occurrence out of the ordinary still caused alarm. But while the people around her complained about the dark television screens and stalled elevators, Rose just smiled. Not far from here, she was running for her life.

Rose asked herself what she was doing here. It was not like she could do anything, change anything… see him again. If there had been any risk they would cross paths she knew she wouldn't have come. She wouldn't risk the world again.

_She had made up her mind, on that day when she left the Doctor and stepped out of the TARDIS forever, that she wouldn't look back. She would pick up the pieces and live a fantastic life, just as he'd wanted._

It wasn't like she hadn't tried. After the 'change' they had carried on and she'd tried to convince herself that it was only his voice that was different, only his smile, only his face. But something deeper had changed, and they had gotten to a point where she could not look past it anymore. And when she told him, he'd smiled sadly and taken her back to London, back to her old life.

But she could never get rid of that niggle in the back of her mind that whispered "what if…?" 

She ignored the discontented people around her and pulled her phone out of her pocket.

"He's calling me about now," she thought, "urging me to run. He always wanted me to run." Rose stared at her phone, willed it to ring. It stayed stubbornly silent. "But this time I couldn't run fast enough and it tore us apart."

_"Stuff Ibiza, I'm celebrating my hen's night at Vegas," her mate Katie drunkenly declared months earlier at her engagement party. "You've gotta come, Rose, you've gotta come and see the lights with me._

"Maybe you'll find yourself someone special and you can have yourself a real Vegas wedding!"

Las Vegas. Why not, Rose had thought. She was young and single, she had the money and work owed her the time off. Why shouldn't she go and have some fun.

And the first few days of the hen's week had been fun. The girls saw the sights, gambled their money away and marvelled at the tacky wedding chapels everywhere. No-one really understood when Rose had said she needed a few days on her own, and bought a ticket to Utah. 

Rose wandered out of Salt Lake City's main shopping mall, onto the street. The power drain had robbed the traffic signals of their lights and left gridlock in its wake. Rose faced the wall of stalled cars in front of her, recalling another barrier she had faced deep in the bowels of Geocomtex.

"I almost made it. But I was too slow and he thought he had killed me," she recalled, quietly. "The Dalek questioned him about the 'woman he loved'. How could it have known what it took us so long to see for ourselves?"

_Her passport said she was only 26, but her eyes echoed experience beyond her years. When she had first returned and interviewed for jobs, people were constantly surprised by the maturity and poise shown by someone so young. It had put her above other applicants her own age, easing her into a trainee position at a big firm that was usually reserved for someone older, with more qualifications._

With the new job had come more money and opportunities that the former shop-girl never would have expected. New friends, too - people whose futures went beyond the council estates and minimum wage, futures that took them around the country, around the world. Futures that would take them a long way.

They would never go as far as she had been. 

Rose scuffed her sneakers on the sidewalk, clutching the mobile in her fist and imaging a time that was both years ago and right now.

"We thought we had all the time in the world, all the time in all of the worlds. There was always the threat of danger, but we believed we could dance with death and slip out before it closed on us."

Behind her the power flickered back on and she smiled, remembering how the light had returned to the base after the Dalek had destroyed itself. The light had returned, too, to the Doctor's eyes - still shining with unshed tears over what had been and what almost came to pass.

Rose tucked the phone back into her jeans. She knew he wasn't going to call.


End file.
